 Perhaps more than any other 20th-century painter, Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944) has been closely linked to the history of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Hilla Rebay (1890–1967)—artist, art advisor, and the museum’s first director—encouraged Solomon R. Guggenheim (1861–1949) to begin collecting Kandinsky’s work in 1929 and to then meet the artist for the first time at the Dessau Bauhaus in July 1930.
This was the start of a period of continuous acquisition of Kandinsky’s art, with more than 150 works ultimately entering the museum’s collection.
Three decades prior to that fateful Dessau meeting, Kandinsky was just launching his artistic career. Shortly after receiving his Doctor of Law, Kandinsky abandoned the legal profession altogether and in 1895 became the art director of the printing firm Kuverev in Moscow. One year later he left for Munich, the major European center for academic training next to Paris, and alternately formed associations with the city’s leading avant-garde groups, including Phalanx, New Artists’ Association of Munich (Neue Künstlervereinigung München), and The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter).
In Munich, Kandinsky quickly realized his talent for working in the three classic graphic mediums—etching, woodcut, and lithography—and began to develop as an artist and theoretician. Woodcut challenged artists to capture the essence of their vision or story through a reduced means of expression, and provided Kandinsky with a vehicle for articulating his romantic tendencies. Recollections of Russia, such as the brightly decorated furniture and votive pictures he had observed in the homes of the peasants, as well as romantic historicism, lyric poetry, folklore, or pure fantasy, informed Kandinsky’s early work.
Kandinsky traveled extensively, making trips to Venice, Paris, Amsterdam, Tunisia, and Russia, before settling in Munich again in 1908 and translating the lyric manner of his printmaking to landscape painting. Such graphic elements as clearly delineated forms, flattened perspective, and the employment of the black and white “noncolors” of his woodcuts, pervade the jewel-colored Bavarian landscapes of 1908–09. These paintings, and the stylized glass paintings that followed, differ remarkably from Kandinsky’s earlier exercises in Impressionist painting. Kandinsky was finally able to evoke the “hidden power of the palette” and move away from his pictorial beginnings, thus setting him off on the road to Abstraction.
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